‘J,’ by Howard Jacobson

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By Matthew Specktor

Dec. 12, 2014

Howard Jacobson’s “J” opens with a parable, or, as the book terms it, an “argument.” A wolf and a tarantula are comparing modes of taking down prey, with the wolf’s rapacious efficiency pitted against the spider’s patience. As is the way with such tales, the wolf is undone by his own skill, polishing off all his quarry until he’s forced to eat his family and finally himself. “Moral: Always leave a little on your plate.”

This story, which I’d never encountered in Jewish literature or any other, stands in mysterious relation, at first, to the meat of the novel itself. “J” is a Holocaust story of sorts — “of sorts” because it is set in a dystopian future, and the calamity in this case is a bit of suppressed early-21st-century history that is referred to, when it is referred to at all, with the Celan-esque phrase “WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED.” The book turns on omission, and so the particulars of this monstrous occurrence are glimpsed only in pieces — ice cream trucks repurposed as objects of menace, for example, threatening the outsiders known as “aphids” — but it’s clear what Jacobson has in mind, which is infinitely more pointed and more fungible than simple allegory. This novel’s dystopia is not that of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” or José Saramago’s “Blindness” (or “The Walking Dead” or “The Hunger Games”; there’s no shortage of futuristic hells to choose from), if only because a very specific history shadows its every move. The effect is surprisingly subtle and, at least at first, disorientingly gentle.

Kevern Cohen is a woodworker, tenant of a small cottage in the village of Port Reuben, whose cliffs overlook a “sea that no one but a few local fishermen sailed on, because there was nowhere you could get to on it — a sea that lapped no other shore.” One afternoon as he strolls through the local market, a stranger points him toward a young lady named Ailinn Solomons: “Fine-looking girl, that one.” And with this seemingly random nudge from the cosmos, the two fall in love. They commence a relationship that is fundamentally tender despite unfolding in a world where Kevern has to explain, for example, the music of Fats Waller. (Jazz, like other arts that allow improvisation or reflect violence, is “not banned — nothing was banned exactly — simply not played.”) There’s something of the fairy tale in their courtship, in this setting and in Ailinn’s house that was “like a children’s story cottage,” overgrown with weeds and slugs. When Kevern teases Ailinn about her big feet, or when we meet the village barber with the ungainly name of Densdell Kroplik, the mood is so nearly whimsical we’re tempted to imagine hobbits. Kevern himself is saddled with a “dopey-eyed, lugubrious smile that had earned him the nickname Coco, after a once famous clown who sometimes reappeared, accompanied by apologies for the cruelty visited on him, in children’s picture books.” Everything is almost peaceful, except that it isn’t at all. The first thing Kevern notices about Ailinn is her bruised eye (indeed, “there was more than one among the women selling preserves and flowers who had a purple eye”), just as the essence of his friendship with that barber is the fear he will get his throat slit during a shave. Kevern doesn’t know much about his own history, as no one knows much — “The past exists in order that we forget it” — but he feels himself an outsider, at odds with the “old ways” cherished by Kroplik. And Ailinn is an outsider, having recently arrived in Port Reuben from up north, in the company of an older woman named Ez, an auntie-like figure she met in a book group.

The linear plot of “J” is rather simple: Ailinn and Kevern meet, court and begin to suspect their relationship is less accidental than it seems. There are mysterious clickings on Ailinn’s “utility phone” that suggest someone might be listening in, and after a brief, beautifully rendered weekend away in Necropolis (as Kevern’s father called the capital city), they discover that someone has broken into Kevern’s cottage. Kevern is questioned, repeatedly, by an Inspector Gutkind (an obsessive little figure who lives alone with his cat in an inland village called St. Eber, where everything is covered with clay dust), over his possible involvement in the murder of a woman he once kissed in a bar, but this is a red herring. He is being watched, too, by one of his art school colleagues, Professor Zermansky, who also keeps an eye on Gutkind. But all of this Dostoyevskian hovering turns out to be in the service of something less persecutory, perhaps, than we would think.

That is the book’s linear plot — yet so much of its complexity, pleasure and occasional difficulty stems from its sequence of omissions and its non-chronological presentation. Early on, we are introduced to one Esme Nussbaum, employee of a corporation called Ofnow, “nonstatutory monitor of the Public Mood,” whose assertion that violence persists in certain corners of the country earns her a trip to the hospital. (This is some 20 years before Kevern and Ailinn meet.) We are given the epistolary narrative of Ailinn’s grandmother, who dismayed her own parents by marrying outside her faith, in a church. Only slowly do these things converge, so we understand the contours of what is actually happening. Even the book’s title invokes a suppression: “J” is the letter Kevern’s father refused to pronounce without placing two fingers across his lips, “J” as in “jazz” or, the word the book never once uses, “Jew.”

In other hands, this might seem coy, all these vaporous hints amounting to little more than another bleak, Orwellian dream shot through with flashes of satire. (An aside in Zermansky’s diary, for example, describes a radio host inveighing against a culture of memory — the old maxim “never forget” — in favor of one of apology: “Only by having everyone say sorry, without reference to what they are saying sorry for, can the concept of blame be eradicated, and guilt at last be anesthetized.”) In the latter part of the novel, however, Jacobson bares his teeth, or rather, holds up the mirror to show us our own bloody fangs. Reflecting on her parents’ torturous marriage, the mysterious Esme considers: “Some equipoise of hatred had been lost. You don’t kill the thing you love, but you don’t kill the thing you hate either.” This equipoise, which Esme is quick to connect to the horrors of WHAT HAPPENED, is a fundamental — perhaps the fundamental — human need. Thinking back on the time she’d spent in the hospital, Esme notes: “We are dead matter until we distinguish ourselves from what’s not dead. . . . Only when we have a different state to strive against do we have reason to strive at all. And different people the same. I am me because I am not her, or you.” This rage for identity isn’t merely ethnic, and it’s inescapable. Suddenly the book’s indirection and evasion, this world that insists upon anodyne art and relentless apology, seems less dystopic and more recognizable, an ongoing effort to wrestle with an intolerable fact of our nature, one we mightn’t come to terms with any other way. And the parable that introduces the novel seems less cryptic; neither the wolf nor the tarantula can match our own predation after all. As Esme puts it: “If we are not forewarned, we will find ourselves repeating the mistakes that led to WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, in the first place. Only this time it will not be on others that we vent our anger and mistrust.”

Jacobson’s earlier novels have been compared with some frequency to Philip Roth’s. That’s been easier to see in books like “Kalooki Nights” and “The Finkler Question,” which borrow against the restless sexuality of the 1950s and Zionist politics, respectively. It’s harder to see Roth in the thrilling and enigmatic refractions of “J,” whose subtle profundities and warm intelligence are Jacobson’s own. But in its bracing recognition that some conflicts are irresolvable, as is conflict itself, there is something of Roth, I think. So too in the stoical acceptance (if that’s what it is) of the book’s brutal conclusion. “J” is not a joyful book, by any means, but its insistent vitality offers something more than horror: a vision of the world in which even the unsayable can, almost, be explained.

Matthew Specktor’s most recent novel is “American Dream Machine.” He is a founding editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books.